This is year B, the year of Mark in the lectionary, but so far you might not have noticed. Today our Gospel readings finally move back there. And, with the brief exception of five weeks in the middle of the summer where we randomly read the sixth chapter of John, we’re going to be with Mark until December. So before we get into the text itself this morning, let’s take some time to reorient ourselves in the world of Mark.
Most scholars place Mark as the earliest of the four Gospels, written around 70 CE. If you remember your history, you may remember what else was taking place around that time. 66 CE was the start of the Jewish Revolt, leading to the siege of Jerusalem and the eventual destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Mark is writing in the immediate aftermath of all of this violence and warfare. The big question Mark’s Gospel addresses is how to be followers of Jesus in such tumultuous times. What did Jesus’ ministry thirty years earlier have to say about how Mark’s community was to live in this time of warfare and chaos, and similarly what does Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection two-thousand years ago have to say about how we are to live today? These are the questions we are to consider, not just this morning, but throughout the rest of the summer as we journey with Mark through Jesus’ ministry.
Another piece to keep in mind as we read Mark’s Gospel is the role of the Pharisees and the bigger question of the Law. There’s this tendency to cast the Pharisees as the foil to Jesus, the strict holders of this outdated law that Jesus came to set us free from. But the Pharisees weren’t classic villains; they were good, law-abiding, religious folk, not unlike you and I. The conference I was at last week included a text study on this text, and one of the presenters remarked on the common trope of Pharisees bad, Jesus good, end of sermon, by very abruptly saying, “That’s not a good sermon.” So we’ll try not to go there. Jesus doesn’t undo the law. Rather, what Jesus does is reorient the law back to its intention. Like any good religious scholar, like the Pharisees themselves, Jesus interprets the law for us, helping us understand through these very concrete examples what it means to be followers of the law and of Jesus, not in ways that are so defined, so concrete as to be abstract, but in ways that have real life and meaning in our world.
The law Jesus dealt with in our reading this morning was about Sabbath-keeping. We heard the specifics of the law in our reading from Deuteronomy, how God commanded the Israelites to “Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” The Hebrew word here translated “holy” is qodesh, which means to be set apart, set aside for a different purpose. According to the end of verse fourteen, they were to set aside the Sabbath day for the purpose of rest. And not just the Israelites were to observe Sabbath, but also “your son, your daughter, your male or female slave, any resident alien in your towns,” even “your ox, your donkey, or any of your livestock.” Everyone in Israel is commanded to be permitted a day of rest after six days of labor.
And the reason for this day of rest? God said, “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out.” Remember that you were a slave, and God set you free. Sabbath-keeping, this pattern of work and rest is about God restoring to the people of Israel the freedom to live full and fulfilling lives, lives that were not controlled by the whims of overseers with no regard for their well-being. Karoline Lewis calls this command to observe the Sabbath “the first labor law, God inventing the weekend.” Observing the Sabbath, then, is not about worship. Or rather, not exclusively about worship. The point of worship is to restore us spiritually so worship is certainly part of Sabbath keeping, but it is not the only part. Observation of Sabbath should encompass all parts of our beings, worship for our souls, relaxation for our bodies, rest for our minds. Both the Sunday morning worship and the Sunday afternoon nap can be important parts of Sabbath keeping. The inclusion of all of Israelite society, not just the religious, but the foreigners who worshiped other gods and even the animals demonstrated that God’s first intention in ordaining the Sabbath was about justice, about making sure that within kingdom of God everyone and everything had what they needed to thrive.
Flash forward a thousand years or so and we find Jesus and his disciples walking through a field on the Sabbath, picking heads of grain as they traveled. We should note here that Jesus and the disciples are not stealing grain. Remember, there are no convenience stores and such for travelers back in those times. So per Deuteronomy, travelers were permitted to pick food from fields along their way. They couldn’t take bushels of the stuff and sell it; that was stealing. But if they could carry it in their hands and eat it as they walked, it was fair game.
But the Pharisees see them picking grain on the Sabbath, and they were like, who do these guys think they are! Have they not read the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath is a day of rest. How dare they pick grain on the Sabbath!
The mistake the Pharisees made is something that is all too easy to do, and certainly something I, and probably some of you, are guilty of. This temptation to take a thing that is good, and so over-regulate it that the life and freedom get sucked out of it. They know that Sabbath is a day of rest; that God created this day so we can rest. A day to remember that we are free from all that holds us captive and because of that, we are free to live rich, full, good lives. But by regulating that rest so tightly, the Pharisees took the freedom, and thus the life-giving restoration, out of observing the Sabbath.
I don’t see the Pharisees here as villains but as victims. Victims of their own making certainly, but still victims. Think of how exhausting it must have been for them to spend so much time and energy worrying about whether or not they were resting in the right way. Which is why Jesus came along and gave them this new interpretation of the old Sabbath law, so that the Sabbath could once again be what God had created it for, a day of restoration and rejuvenation, a day to bring life and health and wholeness.
Dear friends in Christ, let the example of the Pharisees be an invitation for us. An invitation to look closely at our own lives and see what things, good things, may not be serving us well any longer. Are there things that we have done so long that they have become drudgerous and obligatory? Things that once brought us life and now we do only out of habit? Let this command to observe the Sabbath, to set apart days for work and days for rest an invitation to us to set apart that which is not life-giving for that which is. If there are things we do because they are the way we’ve always done them, let us read in this passage an invitation not to do them anymore. The world will not end, I promise. And, what’s more, when we remember that we are not slaves to anything, that God led us to freedom, that God created us for freedom, then in the putting aside of old things, we will certainly find space and time for new and life-giving things. Like Jesus healed the man with the withered hand, in this practice of setting aside, we will find the withered parts of ourselves restored. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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